


heart second-hand

by softlyblue



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, Reunions, Unhealthy Relationship Implied By The Ship, this is gross im sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24189694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyblue/pseuds/softlyblue
Summary: "I'm so sorry," the man says, looking completely unapologetic, "You reminded me of someone I once knew. My name is Elias."
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Peter Lukas/Jonah Magnus
Comments: 14
Kudos: 108





	heart second-hand

**Author's Note:**

> this is horrible i hate it. im meant to be working on a longfic which is almost ready for posting and then 167 happened and i ended up complaining about jons self worth issues for like. three hours. and now i am here
> 
> gentle cw for mentions of violence & unhealthy relationships & domestic abuse i guess (?) because they are both horrible men

It is not a new observation, nor a particularly inventive one, to say that one is often loneliest in a crowd, surrounded by people who all have stronger relationships with someone that isn't you. All the same, something doesn't have to be new or inventive to be effective, and so Peter finds himself perfectly content here in the corner of a loud, raucous bar, drinking a warm and unpleasant pint of stout as he watches the clock.

Despite the day, and despite the hour, the corner Peter is in is completely empty. People aren't even choosing not to come near him; it's Brownian, people just bouncing off each other carrying drinks or each other, somehow never managing to reach the little three or four feet around Peter that remains gloweringly empty.

He doesn't mind. He likes it. When he goes to the bar for a second, a third, people drift away from him, but nobody notices it either, this hulking great man that pushes people away from him like a magnet turned inside out.

He likes it. Loneliness tastes interesting when it isn't his own, but there is comfort in himself, like a favourite meal from childhood - like a beloved, boring, but familiar old book.

"Same again," he says to the woman behind the bar, her small hand on the tap. He doesn't say thanks, and she doesn't say anything, just takes a fresh glass from the stack behind her and begins to pull a heavy measure. He puts his elbows on the bar, and savours the emptiness around him -

"Hello, there," someone says, very close to his ear.

Peter is intrigued. Someone drunk enough to miss even the signals of the lonely must be both incredibly drunk and incredibly powerful, and they would have acknowledged Peter if they were in any way aware of it, so it must be one of those few poor souls wandering London touched by a power in a way they don't know about. He wonders who they're talking to.

And then a hand touches his shoulder, and he realises they're talking to _him._

"You aren't deaf, are you?" says the someone, and their voice is crisp and it doesn't slur and they aren't drunk at all. "You can hear me, can't you?"

"You have the wrong person," Peter says curtly. He takes his pint from behind the bar, only half-settled with a horridly thick bishop's collar, but cold at least. "Excuse me."

The man, for man it is, looks amused by this instead of offended, as Peter hoped he might. He is shorter than Peter - most people are - and willowy, dressed up as most people are tonight but in the opposite direction, as though he's just come from work instead of from a gaff at some house or other. White shirt, buttoned up a beautiful throat, cuffed at the wrists terribly tightly, tucked into the waist of checked trousers of the sort Peter might have seen Jonah wear when he wore that ugly man sometime between the two wars.

And now we reach the central issue -

Because Peter had been trying not to think of him.

"I'm so sorry," the man says, looking completely unapologetic, "You reminded me of someone I once knew. My name is Elias."

"That's fascinating," Peter says flatly, and walks back to his corner. The band has begun to play again, some dreadful thing, and he can hardly hear himself think over the sound of the bass turned up far too high, too loud for anyone to hear what the singer is saying. His corner has been undisturbed, but when he sits in the seat he claimed he finds Elias has followed him. "I'm sorry, but I'm evidently _not_ the someone you once knew."

"But they say this day is all about new beginnings, and I'm willing to take a risk," Elias says. His eyes - which are dark, brown, and wide - are winking in the dim light of the TV behind Peter, currently playing the countdown to midnight, as though that matters. It's muted, and nobody is watching when they're all too busy celebrating themselves.

"You may be willing to, but I am perfectly happy where I am."

"Stagnant," Elias purrs, placing his sharp chin in the curve of his palm so he can lean forward across the table, "Solid. That's not a very good mantra."

The taste of Peter's loneliness is rapidly vanishing, being replaced instead with the growing feeling of being -

It feels like -

It _felt_ like how Jonah would look at him, in the mornings, when he knew Peter wanted to go, when he knew Peter was using him to taste. Jonah would look, and he would be naked but for the sheets wrapped around his middle, and Peter would never be sure which of them was getting the drop on the other.

Touched by the Eye, then, and unknowingly. A rough enough fate for anyone, but Peter doesn't feel bad. Peter doesn't feel anything.

"I may be stagnant, but I'm perfectly happy to," he says instead of any of that. "Now, I don't want to trouble you, but I believe it's about to turn midnight. I'd like to see in the new year with myself."

"But who will you kiss?" Elias asks. To have a stranger croon at him over the table is disturbing in the highest, and Peter wants to go somewhere else, feel the emptiness of some other bar. Some place without this - thing.

"I won't."

"But who will _I_ kiss?"

"Presumably, a friend," Peter says, and tips his glass up to fish the dregs from the bottom. It is very, very bad.

"Presumably," Elias reaches out for the empty glass and traces his finger around the rim, and Peter finds himself watching the way the beer and his saliva mix on the tip of it there, long and slender and bent the wrong way. The glass hums the way wet glass does, and it goes right through Peter's head. "But what if I don't have any of those?"

"Everyone has friends," Peter says, and immediately he wants to leave. Imagine if his father had heard him say that - a cousin, even - how _embarrassing._ Doesn't he know more than anyone that nobody has friends, really, when you get down to it?

"Well then I must not be everyone," Elias stops humming at the glass and puts his finger, instead, on his bottom lip. It's a thin bottom lip, attached to an equally thin top lip, but Peter can't look away from how the neatly curved fingernail digs into the skin there, almost but not quite piercing it. It reminds him of Jonah. They would hurt each other quite often, when the little perks of being conventional lost their taste, and Peter would hold him by the throat until his eyes were red and his cheeks were purple, and he would make him hurt and he would make him feel small and he would make him feel like the last person alive in the world, and Jonah would trap him with a well-placed snarl and draw lines down his chest with the bread-knife, and cut the bottoms of his feet all to ribbons so he couldn't walk to leave, and pull blood from his body that Peter didn't even know he had.

He wonders if Elias likes to hurt.

"You are everyone," Peter says primly, "Because you aren't me."

"That's self-involved of you, don't you think?"

"I try not to, on the whole."

"To be self-involved?"

"To think." Peter turns his wrist to the inside, checking his watch. Three minutes to midnight. "I find it a waste of time."

"Now _that_ is just pretentious," Elias takes his finger from his lips and all is well until he puts it back on the glass, two of them this time, as light as a butterfly landing on a trembling weed. "Unless you enjoy being gormless, which I doubt."

"I try not to do that, either."

"Gormlessness?"

"Enjoyment," Peter watches the hands. He doesn't want to. "You remind me very much of someone I once knew, too."

But it can't be, because the last time Peter saw Jonah he wrapped his arms around the man, and kissed his beautiful forehead and licked the salt from his cheeks where he wept, and linked his wrists together with thick sailing rope, and his ankles with more of the same, and covered his eyes with a strip of long, black cloth. Jonah had asked him not to, in that horribly silken voice he has, always scheming and never losing. It had been desperate, though. Jonah hadn't wanted him to.

Peter had kissed him - he almost had to kneel to do so, because Jonah was short in that particular one and Peter has always been tall, and then he had slapped him hard just because he could. Jonah made a noise, one that Peter wanted to bottle and listen to on rainy days, and he'd said: "Peter, don't-"

And Peter had pushed him into the ocean. It was nothing personal. Jonah had been meddling, and the Lonely wanted him to stop, and something as moronic as a physical relationship was not going to stop Peter from doing the bidding of his god.

The people outside the bar, dancing in the streets, have begun to chant a countdown. _Ten, nine, eight..._

Elias turns his head to look, and in the orange light Peter sees an earring caught there in his lobe, dangling sinister and thin, so thin it almost doesn't exist at all. A line of silver thread hangs an inch down, maybe two, and ends in the curved, unmistakable symbol of an open eye.

_Three, two, one -_

The kiss is brutal, and violent, and Peter tastes blood and he doesn't know whose it is and he doesn't care so long as one of them is hurting. Jonah's loneliness is a wonderful thing, brewed to perfection and left to simmer, and as his sharp, sharp fingernails dig into the skin of Peter's neck, and as Peter pulls on the end of his hair hard enough to wrench it out, he thinks -

Treacherously, but he thinks -

That he will be glad for the company.

**Author's Note:**

> twt sweetlyblue  
> tumblr softlyblue
> 
> i can only apologise


End file.
